Tiered spatial conservation prioritizations for sagebrush ecosystems in northwest Colorado

This data release includes the results (and some input data) of a spatial conservation prioritization intended to guide management of sagebrush ecosystems in northwest Colorado. Stemming the loss and degradation of sagebrush ecosystems requires science-based tools to balance diverse habitat requirements of species and guide management actions to where they are most likely to successfully achieve desired outcomes. Through a series of end-user engagement workshops, we identified northwest Colorado as an ideal location for co-developing a decision support tool that can guide strategic conservation delivery by identifying optimal areas for specific sagebrush management actions. We partnered with Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) staff to adapt a local application of the Prioritizing Restoration of Sagebrush Ecosystems Tool (PReSET) to address three primary sagebrush management actions implemented by CPW: 1) long-term conservation of important sagebrush habitat (SBConservation), 2) protection of fire vulnerable sagebrush habitat (SBWildfireProtection), and 3) restoration of sagebrush habitat where success was most likely (SBRestoration). To meet CPW objectives, we ran four iterations related to each conservation action using varied combinations of input data representing: a) vegetation only (VegOnly), b) vegetation and greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus; Veg_GRSG), c) vegetation, greater sage-grouse, and sagebrush songbirds (Veg_GRSG_Songbirds), and d) vegetation and greater sage-grouse, constrained by the Sagebrush Conservation Design (Veg_GRSG_SCD). This structure culminated in twelve unique results outputs, where the base file name is composed of the problem number (e.g., Problem 1a), followed by the management action (e.g., _SBConservation) and the iteration (e.g., _VegOnly.tif). Each results layer depicts three tiers of prioritization: Tier 1) the highest priority sites totaling 50,000 acres, Tier 2) high priority sites totaling 100,000 acres, and Tier 3) medium priority sites totaling 150,000 acres. In total, each output file prioritizes 300,000 acres for management. Finally, to facilitate interpretation and reproducibility of our results, this data release also includes two planning unit layers (PlanningUnits_Problems1and2_PotentialSB.tif, PlanningUnits_Problem3_DegradedSB.tif) and three feature layers (SageConn_CCDConn_Loss1985_2020.tif, SBRecovery_SBCover_Drill_Artemisia_NoFire.tif, SBRecovery_SBCoverIncrease_Drill_Artemisia_NoFire.tif) we derived from published datasets specifically for this effort.